Unmoored and UnMammied

by Mark SteynSteyn on CultureOctober 7, 2017

https://www.steynonline.com/8161/unmoored-unmammied

Mark "takes a knee" to give it the full Mammy on stage at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis (the set behind is for Romeo and Juliet, who had problems of their own with their respective mammies and pappies).

Tonight, Saturday, I'll be back on "The Greg Gutfeld Show" for a full hour, joining Greg, Kat Timpf, Tyrus and Pete Hegseth coast to coast across America on Fox News at 10pm Eastern/7pm Pacific. I always enjoy it, so I hope you'll tune in. Shortly before that, I'll be here with a Nobel Prize-themed edition of Mark at the Movies.

Ahead of that a couple of footnotes on the last week:

~I mentioned on television yesterday that the Democrats have much greater success slicing and dicing the First Amendment than they do the Second - because gun ownership is real and concrete and the confiscation and banning of actual things is easier to grasp than the incremental shriveling of something abstract such as freedom of expression. But it is striking how the assault on the latter has accelerated ever since, in the wake of the church shooting in Charleston, the Democrat-media complex forced the banishing of the Confederate flag and even of reruns of "Dukes of Hazzard". In two years we've progressed from taking down the Confederate flag to toppling Civil War statuary - and now the removal of a monument to America's first great songwriter, Stephen Foster. That last saddens me.

The object is to unmoor Americans from their entire inheritance - because a citizenry so unmoored is that much more pliable and ripe for anything the social engineers wish to inculcate. As I wrote a week ago:

Ever since all this statue-toppling business began earlier in the summer, I find I can't stop bursting into "Waiting For The Robert E Lee". Does anyone else have that problem? I can't recall even thinking of it for a couple of decades, but you may have noticed I broke into "Way down on the levee/In old Alabammy" onTucker Carlson last night, and onRush the week before. Don't ask me why - although, as a general proposition, whenever the cultural totalitarians attempt to torch even the most minor artifact, it generally behooves us to put it into heavy rotation (see, e.g.,my frequent performances of "Kung Fu Fighting" since the Isle of Wight coppers designated performances thereof as a hate crime).

With that in mind, on Monday, introducing me at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis for the Center of the American Experiment, Howard Root referenced the NFL controversy and said the only person I'd "take a knee" for would be the Queen. For some reason, I found myself thinking of Mark Steyn Club Founding Member Joseph Huber's comment last weekend on The Jazz Singer:

No one took a knee (except Jolson).

So I dropped to one knee at the Guthrie and gave it the full Mammy (see top right). Afterwards, talking to some theatregoers, I found a line of song suddenly popped into my head, accompanied by jazz hands:

Nobody's singin' bout my Mammy...

And I thought: What the hell is that from? And eventually I remembered: It's from a novelty song I haven't heard since my childhood, written by Irwin Levine and L Russell Brown, who had a monster smash with "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree" and a few lesser hits through the Seventies. The premise is this: Al Jolson comes back to life and discovers the music scene has changed somewhat. The closing moments, as he pines for his missing Mammy, are oddly affecting. Enjoy:

There used to be a zillion Jolson impersonators, but the longest-lasting and all-time greatest soundalike is the guy singing there, from Hull in northern England: Clive Baldwin.

The hostility to any cultural artifact incompatible with contemporary sensibilities is not only deeply totalitarian but ultimately supremely moronizing. You'll recall that halfwit Massachusetts librarian who rejected a gift of books from Melania Trump because Dr Seuss is racist. She got that ahistorical idiocy from The School Library Journal:

She points out that the Cat in the Hat, perhaps Seuss' most famous character, is based on minstrel stereotypes. 'The Cat's physical appearance, including the Cat's oversized top hat, floppy bow tie, white gloves, and frequently open mouth, mirrors actual blackface performers.'

By the way, if a black cat with a floppy bow tie is now a "blackface performer" and "minstrel stereotype", then my own cat Marvin is the most racist feline on the planet and should follow up our last CD with an album of Marvin Sings Mammy Songs. Here's a close-up from the cover of our Feline Groovy: Songs for Swingin' Cats:

Appalling! Are Marvin and I also banned from Massachusetts school libraries? Happily, Feline Groovy has lots of five-star reviews at Amazon, and for the moment remains legally available on CD - or, for instant gratification, via digital download from Amazon or iTunes. But my racist cat will be going the way of that Stephen Foster statue any day now...

~Tomorrow, Sunday, we'll have another Mark Steyn Club video bonus in our occasional series of me reading poetry - before all the poems are banned. Tomorrow's is a corker.

If you're a member of The Mark Steyn Club and you disagree with me on any of this historico-cultural erasure, then have at it in our comments section. We have fun in The Mark Steyn Club: you can join for the full year or, lest you suspect it's some dodgy Internet scam by a sleazy fly-by-night Canuck snakeoil salesman, sign up for an experimental three months. For more info, please see here - and don't forget our new gift membership.

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16 Reader Comments

P. Gao • Oct 8, 2017 at 22:25

Give Marvin a pat. He sold a CD today. Good kitty!

P. Gao • Oct 8, 2017 at 17:32

Too funny. They can eat Dr. Seuss with jalapeno sauce on top for all we care, those books aren't as fantastique as they've been made out to be by the predecessors of this new pitchfork mob. But it's not often there's such a set-up to make so smooth a segue into reminding all about such a suave purr-former as this. Marvin wins!

Joseph Huber • Oct 7, 2017 at 22:21

Thanks for remembering Mark...it made my day!

Stanley Bernstein • Oct 7, 2017 at 19:22

Re: removing, destroying or relocating the Stephen Foster statue: I think the American world has gone bonkers. The most vociferous white people are ashamed of their involvement in enslaving blacks, even though the process occurred more than 150 years ago. As we all agree slavery was a bad idea, the answer of a muddled, but potent minority is to destroy every vestige of that evil history. Thus, all will feel better, which is the primary requirement today...let's just feel good. I would like to contrast this attitude to the opinion of Dwight D. Eisenhower when word came to him of the atrocities unearthed at the death camps liberated by American soldiers in WW II. He insisted on photographing everything, so that history would confront the evil. Apparently, the soft narcissists of today cannot confront anything even slightly disjointed against their assumed world view.

Elizabeth • Oct 7, 2017 at 18:11

1. It never ceases to amaze me how squeamish the left is. They mustn't be able to get out the front door without second-guessing themselves.2. I love Marvin. Forever.

Debra Milligan • Oct 7, 2017 at 15:24

The attempt by the Suits (record companies) in the 1970s to inject hippie-dippie-trippie music into the Country Music Industry was met with the overall symbolic response of Charlie Rich flicking his bic on tv at the CMA awards show.

The look on Glen Campbell's face is as priceless as the rebel act by the Silver Fox, may he forever rest in peace. There's a video of that one somewhere!

Denyse O'Leary • Oct 7, 2017 at 15:17

Progressives deny anyone except themselves the right to memories or a story. For example, virtually no one except progressives thinks that The Cat in the Hat is racist. More to the point, most us have personal associations with it. Forcing us to give the character up because they themselves have decided, on some obscure ground, that the cat is racist, is one of the best pieces of evidence for the totalitarian bent of the progressive movement.

They won't stop. They can't. They will be after your childhood memories next.

Increasingly, for the sake of living any semblance of a normal and reasonable life, we must see to it that progressives are slowly, surely, and peaceably retired from public life. They can think a paper clip is racist in the privacy of their own homes. Better for everyone.

Debra Milligan • Oct 7, 2017 at 14:39

And now this morning, thank you, Mark for the auditory jogging of my memory -- I have to banish the Spike Jones song, "You Always Hurt (Bang Bang) The One You Love."

I first heard about Spike Jones from a future Italian in-law who played Spike Jones as a kind of theme song to his life, especially the one with his (x) wife.

Can you imagine this guy's stuff being played today? Spike Lee has replaced Spike Jones and not for the better.

Charles Ratz • Oct 7, 2017 at 14:16

Mark,How about some Marvin products. Autographed (by you and
Marvin) copies of the album cover, coffee cups, t-shirts. Marvin is such a handsome fellow and adds diversity to your product line despite his triggering bow-tie.

Benjamin Car • Oct 7, 2017 at 13:47

It says a lot about the state of academia that contriving ludicrous theories about racial innuendo in children's books passes for actual scholarship. I think that firing at least half the idiots involved in the educational professions would be a massive improvement. But I could go on all day...

Also, I think you've got one thing wrong. You said, "The object is to unmoor Americans from their entire inheritance." True, but I think that the converse is even more true: Americans wouldn't be destroying their historical inheritance if they weren't all but entirely disassociated from it already.

Paul Harmon • Oct 7, 2017 at 13:34

"The object is to unmoor Americans from their entire inheritance..." - Which is why the left has been so energetic in about ensconcing atheism as the state religion and making Christianity "private", and out of the public square.

Debra Milligan • Oct 7, 2017 at 13:30

"Marvin" is sharpening his claws, in readiness for this month that means so much to the black cat!

The Left has been so anti-American for so long that it no longer comprehends that it seeks to destroy the very constitutional rights by which it seeks to destroy basic US constitutional rights. And their ignorance of any culture at all is sickening.

Stephen Foster was one of the greatest songwriters of this great land. Your championing the true art that once was -- whether it be music, film, literature, even classical liberal philosophy -- there is the gift that Mark Steyn always offers to Americans. And to the world.

Not to sully this comment or this superb article, but I must ask if the dirt coming out the Counter-Culture King Creep Weinstein in Hollywood is one major explanation as to the dreck and dearth of talent, at least in film, for the past 30-40 years?

The casting couch became the casting condo, and I, for one, think that the studio heads and certain actresses (and actors) who at least knew the game and played it well, were producing an art form that Americans can still treasure, not the regrettable forgettable stuff of the past 30 years or so.

Debra Milligan Debra Milligan • Oct 7, 2017 at 14:11

Unmoored and unmammied -- but tethered to the Welfare State and forever nannied.

I'd thought the Nanny State, at least here in California, was going to die a long, agonizing death. But judging by the looks of this hag, the demise will be briefer than I'd thought. Of course, the liberals do not want conservatives to employ one of the liberal's major tenets to society, Citizen/physician-assisted-suicide (which is linguistically impossible) to their beloved vampire, the Welfare State, even as it creates countless tragedies for the citizenry.

We conservatives will stand back and live our lives (since liberals do not really have lives to live) and watch the liberals devour each other. Or most of us will watch. I've a squeamish stomach.

TP • Oct 7, 2017 at 10:50

"...and for the moment remains legally available..." --> Hilarious!

I love your technique of always placing current events into a broader, recent timeline context, so that the progressively downward societal trend becomes clearer to see. It sometimes appears that we've moved from 'Slouching Towards Gomorrah' to "sprinting" there.

Scott Drew • Oct 7, 2017 at 10:35

Martin Niemoller's poem 'First they came...' would be much shorter in today's American politically bend over backwards culture. It would go something like, First they came for me, to protect the socialists, the abortionists, the gays, the blacks, the gender ambivalent, and so on...Today all that matters is the group that you are identified with, the individual be damned. The hyphenization of America has broken us down faster, internally, than any outside force ever could.